Further Developments Of The Peoples' Commission And NHRC

The Peoples' Commission met in early August, 1998, with Justice Jaspal Singh taking the place of Justice Reddy, who had become ill. Despite a change of venue due to governmental interference, attendance was high, people coming from all over Punjab to sit for three days to hear proceedings in a language many could not speak (English). This fact alone speaks to the deep desire of the people that justice should be done. Many came forward to report cases of disappearance and other atrocities while the meeting was in session.

Within weeks of this initial meeting, however, the Director General of Punjab Police indicated his intention to move the High Court for a ban on the Peoples' Commission. This took the form of a Public Interest Litigation Petition, seeking to restrain the Peoples? Commission from conducting its proposed second meeting on October 23, 24, and 25 in Ludhiana. The petition argued that the Peoples' Commission poses a serious threat to India's national security interests and aims to subvert India's judiciary by setting up a parallel system. Both the Union government and the Punjab government were made parties to this petition. Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal of Punjab, though elected on the promise that his administration would seek full accountability for abuses, condemned the current efforts as "opening old wounds." The Akal Takht, highest seat of religious authority for the Sikhs, continued to support the independent effort at accountability represented by the Peoples' Commission.

On September 10 the Supreme Court of India intervened, upholding at this late date the original August 1997 order that had asked the NHRC to itself investigate the issues. Representatives of the Peoples' Commission and the Committee for Coordination welcomed this development, and suggested they would find ways for their personnel to work with the NHRC to carry the documentation project to completion if the NHRC does find itself able to proceed. The Justices comprising the Peoples' Commission, however, decided to await the decision of the High Court on the status of the Commission before proceeding with its proposed second sitting in October. At this point the Committee for Coordination continues to carry out its primary documentation work, while the further involvement of the NHRC and Peoples' Commission is pending.

Not only have truth commissions in other parts of the world been accepted as essential to the healing process following a period of social breakdown and abrogation of law, but India itself has a long history of such efforts. In the spirit of grassroots democracy, peoples' commissions or tribunals had been set up to investigate violence against minority communities in Delhi, Meerut, Aligarh, Karnataka, Ayodhya, and Maharashtra. Justice Suresh of the current Peoples' Commission had also served on a Peoples' Tribunal that investigated the Bombay riots of 1992-93, which operated in tandem with the official Shri Krishna Commission. (We may note that in this case the official commission took six years to come out with the very same findings that the peoples' tribunal made public in six months.) The florescence of such commissions speaks to the democratic impulse in the Indian people, who have come out on their own to find out truths that the Indian government has been unwilling to reveal. The current attempt to ban the Peoples' Commission in Punjab through the use of Article 226 of the Constitution is clearly an attempt to cover up the fact of atrocities in Punjab, which if widely known could spark serious scepticism about the Indian state itself and its own commitments to democracy and human rights.